The Individual Psychology of Group Hate

JOURNAL

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JOURNAL OF HATE STUDIES Hate and Political Discourse Volume 10 ! 2012

Volume 10, No. 1 2012

Gonzaga University

I N S T I T U T E F O R H AT E S T U D I E S H AT E A N D P O L I T I C A L D I S C O U R S E

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Volume 10

2012

Number 1

The Individual Psychology of Group Hate Willa Michener

Suggested Citation: APA: Michener, W. (2012). The Individual Psychology of Group Hate. Journal of Hate Studies, 10(1), 15-48. Retrieved from: http://journals.gonzaga.edu/index.php/johs/article/view/177. Bluebook: Willa Michener, The Individual Psychology of Group Hate, 10 J. HATE STUD. 15 (2012), available at http://journals.gonzaga.edu/index.php/johs/article/view/177. ALWD: Willa Michener, The Individual Psychology of Group Hate, 10 J. Hate Stud. 15 (2012), available at http://journals.gonzaga.edu/index.php/johs/article/view/177.

The Individual Psychology of Group Hate Willa Michener Massachusetts Institute of Technology ABSTRACT Revenge is often taken against people who were not perpetrators of the original offense, provided that they belong to the perpetrator’s group. People react as if they believed that if one member of a group attacked, then they all did or would. Groups are culturally defined, though the tendency to relate to them is universal. It is proposed that “the enemy” is an inherited category while the identity of the groups placed into that category is learned. Enemies are subject to hate, fear, and coldness (the inhibition of empathy). We are prepared to experience an entire outgroup as “enemy” if any of them attack us. We anticipate the same reaction in outgroups by experiencing them as “enemy” when any of us attack them. We mirror fellow ingroup members’ hatreds. Keywords: hatred, ethnocentrism, racism, misia, xenophobia, hate crime

On September 11, 2001, after the South Tower at the World Trade Center fell and while the North Tower still stood burning, a caller to the Howard Stern radio program in New York City said this: Howard, I’ll tell you what. The first second I hear on the news that it has anything to do with a towelhead or a dothead bastard I’m gonna go out there and start goin’ to those A-rab stores and I’m gonna start kickin’ ass . . . get those assholes out of the whole freakin’ neighborhood [here the hosts interrupt to say “Stop it, stop it . . . ” but the caller goes on] and I implore all Americans to get your arms together, baby, get out there on the streets and go to your local freakin’ deli [Here the radio host hangs up on him, saying to the audience “He’s just upset” and the co-host says “I know but he’s an idiot.”].

Another caller said: Whoever claims this whether we have proof or not just freakin’ annihilate

Willa Michener holds a B.A. in economics from Swarthmore College, a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.P.A. from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in physiological psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a research affiliate at the Center for International Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is interested in the evolutionary psychology of emotion. 15

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the country. Don’t worry about the kids, the old people. Just freakin’ wipe the country out . . . You see how they wiped out the twin towers. Wipe out the country! Babies? Who cares about their babies?

One of the hosts responded: Yeah no one cares about their babies. Not me! (From a recording of the September 11, 2001 broadcast)

The hosts went on to advocate annihilating the entire population of Afghanistan or any other country that might be harboring terrorists. Four days later, Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot to death as he planted flowers outside his filling station in Mesa, Arizona. News accounts stated blandly that Frank Roque killed him in revenge for the attacks of September 11 (Gallegus, 2001). They did not explain why Roque had targeted a person who was not a perpetrator of the 9/11 crimes. It was assumed that readers would already know that people take revenge against innocents who belong to the same group as a guilty person. It was pointed out that Roque got his victim’s group membership wrong, since Balbir Singh Sodhi was neither Muslim nor Arab. On the same day, a Pakistani Muslim was shot to death in Dallas, Texas, and an Egyptian Christian was killed in San Gabriel, California (Mozingo, 2001; Vaishnav, 2001). These murders could be called third-party revenge because the victims were not involved in the original offense, either as perpetrator or as victim. They were third parties. Third-party revenge has also been called “vicarious retribution” (Lickel, Miller, Stenstrom, Denson, & Schmader, 2006). It appears in many cultures. In Rwanda, the Hutu genocide against Tutsis began hours after the assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu (Des Forges, 1999). Hutu Power leaders blamed the murder on the Tutsi-dominated rebel force, though the accusation was never proved. When Straus (2003) interviewed self-confessed genocidaires in prison afterwards, 70% gave the Habyarimana murder as a reason for the genocide. One man put it succinctly: “We killed them because they were Tutsi and because the Tutsi had killed Habyarimana” (Straus, 2003, p. 8). Straus summarizes the logic of this as “all Tutsi had to be blamed for the killing of Habyarimana” (p. 8). Tutsi babies were killed too (Des Forges, 1999). Perhaps the Hutu Power leaders had anticipated these events; certainly they had prepared for the genocide in advance (Des Forges, 1999; Powers, 2002). It is possible that they killed Habyarimana themselves and accused the Tutsi of having done it in order to provoke the reaction (Des Forges, 1999). On February 27, 2002, the Sarbamati Express train stopped in the town

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of Godhra in India. Its passengers were Hindu activists returning from a pilgrimage to the disputed Babri Mosque/Ram Temple site in Ayodhya. Some of the passengers taunted a Muslim vendor at the train station. The dispute escalated until local Muslims set fire to the train, killing 58 people. The next day, other Hindus conducted a pogrom against other Muslims. Hindu extremists of Ahmedabad raped Muslim women, then cut them and burned them to death. In all, hundreds of men, women, and children were killed. The Muslims of Ahmedabad were said to be surprised and uncomprehending (Human Rights Watch, 2002; ur Rahman, 1998; Varshney, 2002). When David Blumenfeld was a schoolboy in New York, he was attacked by a gang of Gentiles he had never seen before. One gang member pushed a knife against his stomach, saying, “You son of a bitch. You killed Jesus! I’m going to kill you.” David escaped when his friends came to his aid (Blumenfeld, 2002, p. 178). What is the psychological origin of the impulse for third-party revenge? Evidently the impulse is often thoughtless, but what feeling is it that comes before thought in these cases? After describing crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia, Ignatieff summed up: The atrocities are held to reveal the essential identity—the intrinsic genocidal propensity—of the peoples in whose name they were committed. All the members of the group are regarded as susceptible to that propensity even though atrocity can be committed only by specific individuals. (1977, p. 197)

People seem to feel as if all the members of an outgroup are responsible for the misdeeds of any one member (Lickel et al., 2006). If one did it, then they all did it, or at least any of them might do it, or “that’s how they are.” In addition, people desire to take revenge against the miscreant outgroup: “one did it/they all did it/get them back.” We may call this the Roque effect after Frank Roque, the man who murdered Balbir Singh Sodhi. It is curious that the rule of “one did it/they all did it” not only causes blame to jump from one individual to another, but also causes blame to jump across time. In 1915, Gourgen Yanikian lost 26 members of his family in the Turkish government’s genocide of ethnic Armenian citizens. Fifty-eight years later, he shot to death Consul Mehmet Baydar and Vice Consul Bahadir Demir of Turkey, in Santa Barbara, California. Before committing the murders, he mailed out a press release saying that he had a personal war against “the Turkish beasts and their government” because of the genocide. In court, he said that he had not committed murder because his victims were “not human.” He had not “killed two men” but had

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destroyed “two evils.” Neither Mehmet Baydar nor Bahadir Demir had yet been born in 1915 (People v. Yanikian, 1974; “Armenian Guilty of Killing Turks,” 1973, p. 9). “One did it/they all did it” applies only to hurtful deeds. Good deeds are not generalized with so much feeling (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1998; Hewstone & Cairns, 2001). Good deeds may be generalized in the way that any example is generalized back to its category (McCauley, Stitt, & Segal, 1980), or perhaps in the way that traits are generalized to every member of an animal species (Gil-White, 2001), but they are not given the special force and importance that bad deeds get. Christians do not have a 2000year-old tradition of thanking Jews for redeeming the world because Christ was a Jew. Osama bin Laden did not thank Americans for Norman Borlaug’s work on the Green Revolution because Norman Borlaug was an American. The Green Revolution saved millions of lives, some Muslim, but what does that have to do with Americans generally? It is evident that “one did it/they all did it” does not apply to one’s own group. Americans would be astonished if anyone said that Americans ought all to suffer for what Frank Roque did. The absurdity would be plain, to Americans. These points demonstrate that “one did it/they all did it” is not a simple result of the ordinary tendency to generalize and simplify. What is it then? I.

IS “ONE DID IT/THEY ALL DID IT” AN EVOLVED PSYCHOLOGICAL ILLUSION?

From Darwin on, evolutionary psychologists have speculated that we evolved to compete, group against group (Alexander, 1987; Barkow, 1989; Darwin, 1871; Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2001; Richerson & Boyd, 1998; van den Berghe, 1981; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). The definition of group is obviously cultural, since some persons identify by nationality, some by tribe or ethnic group, some by clan or lineage, some by religion, some by party or ideology, some by village or region, some by race, and some by caste or social class. Nevertheless, the tendency to identify some one group as our own, and others as alien, may be an inherited species-wide trait. If we did evolve to compete group against group, then there are probably many separate inherited traits that enable that competition. The most obvious test of whether a trait is inherited is heritability, the proportion of the variation in the trait that may be explained by variation in the genes. The tendency to have phobias is known to be heritable as concordance, for the trait is higher in identical than in fraternal twins. The specific content of the phobia is not (Kendler, Karkowski, & Prescott, 1999). Possibly the tendency to generalize hatred to all of an outgroup will

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prove to be heritable even though the identity of the group to be hated can not be. The heritability of a trait is zero either when the trait is not genetic, or when it is but there is no variation in the genes across individuals. Having two legs is genetic but not heritable: All the variation in number of legs is due to environmental factors. How can a species-wide genetic influence on a behavior be detected, when the genes involved are unknown? The problem is not simple (Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989; Rozin, 2000). One test is whether the trait in question crosses cultural lines. For example, in most cultures, disgust is expressed by gestures for the rejection of food, such as curling the upper lip and extruding the tongue. These facial expressions are considered impolite in Japan, so the Japanese usually suppress them. However, they make the same expressions while watching disgusting films if they think no one will see. Japanese also recognize the meaning of the expressions in others. In every culture tested, people recognize these expressions as signs of disgust. Consequently, the use of food rejection gestures to indicate disgust is thought to be inherited (Ekman, 1982). The example suggests that one should be able to identify traces of a species-wide evolved trait in any given culture, regardless of the culture’s overt evaluation of the trait. French culture generally favors individual responsibility, but the diarist H.C. Robinson recorded an exception to the rule. A French soldier had once been rescued by Englishmen just as he was about to be killed by Spanish soldiers. On encountering Robinson some time later, he said, “Oh, you are English, so I like you! If you were Spanish I would have slit your throat.” “What! Kill me when I have done nothing to you?” asked Robinson. “If it wasn’t you, it was your brother. If not your brother, then your cousin. It’s the same thing. One can’t find the individual, it’s impossible” (Fison & Howitt, 1967, p. 157, author’s translation). Fison and Howitt repeated Robinson’s story in an 1880 work on the South Pacific. They remarked on the fact that certain Fijian groups saw a community as “one body” so that if anyone were injured by an attack from outside the community, everyone in the community would feel himself hurt and entitled to strike back. Furthermore, since the other community would also be only “one body,” it would not matter which “part” of the other community one struck. Fison and Howitt supposed that the Frenchman’s spontaneous outburst and the formal Melanesian belief came from the same human feeling. Many cultures have institutionalized and regularized third-party revenge. During the 1930s in what is now Sudan, the Nuer people maintained that revenge killing was right and proper as against any relative of a

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murderer, provided that the relationship was through the male line (“your brother . . . your cousin . . . same thing”). Revenge could be taken against infants just as well as against adults (Evans-Pritchard, 1968). In southern Africa, among the !Kung San, the relatives of a murder victim may raid the murderer’s group, killing anyone they can (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). Various traditional cultures of Melanesia made revenge for a murder a moral obligation for male relatives. The murderer would be the preferred target, but a different member of the outgroup would do (Trompf, 1994). Among the Yanomamo of Brazil, the key grouping is a kind of mobile village or band. A killing by a man from another village must be repaid by a killing of someone in the murderer’s village. A brisk anger against all of the other group accompanies these killings (Chagnon, 1992). The idea of collective responsibility can take hold even in a modern culture. At the same time that Evans-Pritchard was studying the Nuer, Adolf Hitler was preaching notions of collective responsibility in Germany. “The Jews” were subjected to all sorts of fantastic accusations, which were widely believed. Jews, every individual Jew included, were blamed for Germany’s surrender in World War I, as well as for the evils of capitalism, communism, and disease. Eventually 6,000,000 Jews were murdered (Goldhagen, 1996; Lifton, 1986). The doctrine of individual responsibility was reintroduced to Germany after the Nazi defeat. First, however, the newly liberated peoples of Europe avenged themselves by conducting an “ethnic cleansing” of the Volksdeutsch, the ethnic Germans living outside the borders of Germany. It is estimated that somewhere between 500,000 and 2,000,000 civilian Germans were murdered or died of hardships after being forced out of their homes (de Zayas, 1986). American culture supports the idea of individual responsibility. Nevertheless, a sort of folk culture of group responsibility shows up in the United States from time to time. In 1969, a European American police officer named Henry Schaad was killed by African Americans in York, Pennsylvania in revenge for an alleged attack by European Americans on an African American youth. No one claimed that Schaad had taken part in the attack. A gang of European Americans then killed a young African American mother named Lillie Belle Allen. They pumped bullet after bullet into her body as she lay slumped and helpless against the side of her car. Allen had nothing to do with Henry Schaad’s death. She was a minister’s daughter visiting from out of town (Bunch, 2001; Robertson, 2001). The European American police officer at the scene, Charles Robertson, explained why no arrests were made: “Everyone knew who was involved. But everyone just thought it was even. One black had been killed and one white. Even” (Bunch, 2001, p. 29).

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According to Pascal Boyer, third-party revenge shows up readily in children. “[A]fter being attacked by one member of the group one can retaliate by attacking another member,” he writes, and, “This elementary intuition is easily acquired by children the world over” (Boyer, 2001, 529). Admittedly, evolutionary adaptation is not the only possible explanation for third-party revenge. One could argue that it appears in many cultures because it is, sometimes, a realistic approach to security. Political scientists Fearon and Laitin point out (1996) that third-party revenge gives all members of an outgroup an incentive to control even their most violent members. This incentive could improve the security of one’s own self and group (Prunier, 1995). However, if the rational pursuit of one’s own security were one’s only motivation, hatred would be unnecessary. Pity might be more appropriate, given that the victims are selected at random. But thirdparty revenge is often accompanied by a vivid hatred. Rational self-interest (or rational group interest) and evolutionary adaptation are not mutually exclusive. If the tendency to commit thirdparty revenge is an adaptation, it is possible that it evolved because a show of the strength of one’s own group tends to deter the outgroup. In appropriate cases, inherited emotional preferences and rational considerations would reinforce each other. This means that one must ask whether “one did it/they all did it” also shows itself in inappropriate cases. If “one did it/they all did it” is due to an evolved mechanism, it ought to arise even when it does not actually add to one’s security. Evolved patterns of feeling and behavior are not necessarily irrational, but they are a-rational. When the conditions that produced them are present, the strategies involved may appear rational, and when they are absent, they may appear irrational. For example, in humans and rats there is a simple rule for learning taste aversion. The animal becomes averse to any flavor that it consumed before experiencing nausea. A delay of hours would block the association of a sound with a shock, but it does not block the association of flavor with nausea (Garcia & Koelling, 1966). Human beings also come to dislike a novel flavor given to them before they are made nauseated by chemotherapy (Bernstein & Webster, 1980). Such inherited, channeled learning has been called “prepared learning” (Seligman, 1971; Seligman & Hager, 1972). There is another well-known example. Human children raised together are sexually inhibited towards each other, whether they are genetically related or not (Shepher, 1971; Wolf & Huang, 1980). Sexual attraction between biological siblings raised apart has not been studied, but there is anecdotal evidence that it occurs (Herbert, 2001). The mechanism is evidently similar in other mammalian species in which adult siblings live in proximity to one another. Individuals who associated with each other in

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infancy do not mate in adulthood, though actual siblings raised apart do (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989). The function of the inhibition against familiars is obviously the avoidance of inbreeding, but the inhibition applies whether there is an actual danger of inbreeding or not. These two simple rules of prepared learning appear rational or functional in some contexts and not in others, but they apply forcefully in both situations. A human being may know that it was chemotherapy and not food that made him nauseated, but he will still be repelled by the flavor of the food he ate just before the chemotherapy. Unrelated couples who were raised together on the same kibbutz are in no danger of inbreeding, and they face no cultural taboo, but they simply can’t feel much sexual attraction to each other (Shepher, 1971). Conscious thought has nothing to do with it. Similarly, “one did it/they all did it” appears in conditions where it does not make sense. In particular, its tendency to skip blame across time is illogical. Gourgen Yanikian did not improve his personal security when he murdered the two Turkish diplomats in California in 1973. Perhaps he improved his group’s security, if future attacks by Turks on Armenians are considered a realistic possibility. The Gentiles attacking the Jewish boy in New York were under no security threat from him or from Jews generally. The victim they claimed to speak for, Christ, was beyond the need of their defense. In Norway, 10,000 children were born to German fathers and Norwegian mothers between 1940 and 1945. After the war, Norwegian hatred of “Germans” was directed at these half-German children. One woman testified that a dentist intentionally drilled into her gums to show her the pain Norwegians suffered under Nazi torture (Mellgren, 2002). One can make sense of this, if at all, only by supposing that the dentist really felt that she was German and that she shared in other Germans’ guilt. The writer Amos Oz recalls meeting a young nun on a train in France. On learning that he was Jewish, she asked about Christ: “He was so sweet; how could the Jews do it to him?” Her voice was so sad that he was tempted to answer, “It wasn’t me–I just happened to have had a dentist appointment on that particular Friday” (Oz, 2000, p. C1). Her question had nothing to do with her personal safety, or even her group safety. However, if she simply, really believed that “one did it/they all did it/they all would do it,” then it would make sense that she would ask the question. Surely if he would kill Christ, he would know why. It is possible to experience “one did it/they all did it” as an emotion even when it contradicts one’s own conscious beliefs. Primo Levi experienced it in this way in Auschwitz.

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In 1944, the camp of Auschwitz was supplying prisoner-slaves to nearby industry. Slaves were allowed to live for a while before being gassed, so assignment as a slave brought the hope of survival. Levi was sent to be tested in chemistry, to see if he could qualify to work in a laboratory. His examiner was one Doktor Ingenieur Pannwitz. Levi writes of his feelings as he entered the office of this man: Pannwitz is tall, thin, blond; he has eyes, hair and nose as all Germans ought to have them, and sits formidably behind a complicated writing-table. I, Haftling 174517, stand in his office, which is a real office, shining, clean and ordered, and I feel that I would leave a dirty stain whatever I touched. When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and looked at me. From that day I have thought about Doktor Pannwitz many times and in many ways. I have asked myself how he really functioned as a man; how he filled his time, outside of the Polymerization and the IndoGermanic conscience; above all when I was once more a free man, I wanted to meet him again, not from a spirit of revenge, but merely from a personal curiosity about the human soul. Because that look was not one between two men; and if I had known how completely to explain the nature of that look, which came as if across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds, I would also have explained the essence of the great insanity of the third Germany. One felt in that moment, in an immediate manner, what we all thought and said of the Germans. The brain which governed those blue eyes and those manicured hands said: “This something in front of me belongs to a species which it is obviously opportune to suppress. In this particular case, one has to first make sure that it does not contain some utilizable element.” And in my head, like seeds in an empty pumpkin: “Blue eyes and fair hair are essentially wicked. No communication possible. I am a specialist in mine chemistry. I am a specialist in organic syntheses. I am a specialist . . . ” (1986, p. 105)

“Blue eyes and fair hair are essentially wicked. . .” He knows that it is not so, and yet he feels it. Similarly, Fania Fenelon reported that she began to hate “all Germans” while she was imprisoned in Auschwitz-Birkenau (Fenelon, 1977). She considered that stereotyping was precisely the vice of the concentration camps, so she resisted her urge to stereotype. When the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot, his brother Charles resolved to go and kill European Americans. He wanted to shoot or poison one white bigot in each county of Mississippi. He bought guns. But a voice in his mind kept saying to him that Medgar would not want it that way. He decided to continue the civil rights work that his brother was

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killed for instead. He consoled himself with the thought that black voting would aggravate the bigots more than revenge killings would anyway (Evers, 1971). An Israeli tank shell struck the house of Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish in Gaza as he spoke on the phone with a reporter. His three daughters and a niece died. He saw their familiar hands and feet torn from their bodies and scattered about the room. With effort he held to his previous abhorrence of hatred and his dedication to peace. He said that he had always worked hard not to attribute misdeeds of particular Israelis to all Israelis, just as he would wish Israelis to work hard not to attribute the deeds of suicide bombers to all Palestinians (Abuelaish, 2010; Berger, 2011). A European American prisoner of war named Robert Knight died of starvation and abuse in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. Years afterwards, his sister, Anne Knight Ruff, found herself feeling dislike for an individual American of Japanese ancestry. She was applying for a job at the American Friends Service Committee, where this man would be her supervisor. She wrote, “I hadn’t realized I still felt prejudiced against the Japanese people. I blamed them for the death of my brother” (Ruff, 2001, p. 238). She knew that this man was an American citizen. She knew that he was a Quaker. She knew that he was a pacifist. She knew that his life’s work consisted of providing for the needs of impoverished refugees. She also knew that as a Japanese American, he was interned during the war, so that it would have been physically impossible for him to hurt her brother if he had wanted to. Still she blamed him for her brother’s death. Her feeling did not seem to be a consequence of her cognitions, since the feeling continued in effect even when she rejected it cognitively. Whatever this is, it is not rational self-interest. Ruff herself did not think it was rational. There are two points to note here. One is that “one did it/they all did it” was irrational in the five cases. Levi and Fenelon knew that there were antifascist Germans, some with fair hair and blue eyes. Evers knew that there were white civil rights workers. Abuelaish personally knew Israelis who grieved with him over the death of his children. Ruff knew that the American Quaker had not harmed her brother. The other point is that Ruff, Levi, Fenelon, Abuelaish, and Evers personally thought that “one did it/they all did it” was wrong. Their feeling didn’t spring from their core beliefs; it opposed them. There was an automatic aspect to the emotion. “One did it/ they all did it” may be best understood as a psychological illusion, comparable to an optical illusion—just as normal, just as convincing, and just as false. An enduring inherited trait must serve a function; otherwise it would not have been conserved in evolution. An optical illusion produces a false perception, but it is a side effect of modes of perceiving that ordinarily

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work well. The rule against mating with the people one lived with as a child does prevent inbreeding; it is simply “misapplied,” so to speak, in the kibbutz case. “One did it/they all did it” must also have a function if it is an evolved trait, or it must have had one in the evolutionary past. “One did it/they all did it” might have evolved to give individuals precautionary fear (McDonald, Navarrete, & Van Vugt, 2012; van der Dennen, 1999). This hypothesis would explain the fact that bad deeds are generalized to an entire group, while good deeds are not. The point of evolution is survival, not truth. It would be more accurate to generalize good and bad deeds equally, but it is safer to generalize bad deeds more. If James Byrd had mistrusted all European Americans, he wouldn’t have gotten into a truck with European American men near Jasper, Texas, and he wouldn’t have ended up being dragged to his death at the end of a chain (Cropper, 1998). Too little trust is an error, but it is a less dangerous error than too much trust. Collective mistrust may even produce errors more often than not, and yet it may produce a net gain in fitness. Evolution may have erred on the side of safety. A feeling of “one did it/they all would” can be beneficial to the individual who has it if it induces a precautionary fear. However, the discussion cannot end here. The rule can be beneficial only if there is a body of hostile or potentially hostile others, an enemy. It may produce errors often, but it must also produce accurate fears sometimes or else it is useless. It would have been useful if group violence was the usual social environment as humans evolved. It is also significant that “One did it/they all did it” involves more than fear. It involves hate. Presumably hatred is a motivation for initiating attacks on others. One must ask how attacks might serve the interests of the individual’s genes. It seems likely that the feeling “one did it/they all did it” is an inherited trait. However, if we are to understand its function, we must consider it in its social context, now and in the evolutionary past. II.

IF “ONE DID IT/THEY ALL DID IT” IS WHAT IS ITS FUNCTION?

AN

ADAPTATION,

We cannot be certain of the course of evolution of a behavior. We can’t observe the behaviors of the prehistoric past. However, we know that capacities for behavior evolve along phylogenetic lines just as structures do. Chimpanzees are our cousins and not our ancestors; nevertheless, their behavior is suggestive evidence of what our ancestors may have done. Their behavior is more likely to reflect an ancestral form where there is still something in common between their behavior and ours. Chimpanzee males go out in groups to raid neighboring communities.

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Young males are especially eager to take part in raids. They enter the other community’s range quietly. If they find an isolated individual, they attack, screaming with excitement. A mother and baby are often targeted, since mothers often forage without other adults nearby. The invading males seize the baby and kill it by biting it and tearing it apart. They may kill the mother in the same way. If they encounter a stronger party, they turn and run. If the invading males do not flee fast enough, the native males may kill them (de Waal & Lanting, 1997; Goodall, 1986; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). It is thought that destroying individuals in foreign communities serves the reproductive advantage of the males because it removes competitors, or future competitors. Male chimpanzees remain in the group of their birth and so have few close relatives in the outgroups, but many in the ingroup. The removal of competition benefits the male and his ingroup, which contains many of his genes. By contrast, female chimpanzees migrate to new groups at puberty or soon afterwards. Females do not ordinarily take part in raids. Their close kin would not be favored if they did (de Waal & Lanting, 1997; Goodall, 1986; Nishida & Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, 1986; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). In the Belding’s ground squirrel, the sex roles are reversed. It is the males who migrate out, and the females who remain in their natal territory. Females make forays to unrelated neighbors’ burrows to kill the young (Sherman, 1981). It is important to note that chimpanzee raids occur in the absence of any specific dispute over resources, territory, or mates. Apparently, the animal’s psychological goal is the attack itself (Wrangham, 1999). We do not know if the chimpanzees experience a subjective hatred. Perhaps they simply enjoy the violence. We do know that they attack forcefully without provocation. Typically, some of the raiders hold down the victim while others hit, stamp, bite, and tear. Sometimes the raiders twist off limbs, or drink the victim’s blood. These techniques are similar to those that chimpanzees use against large prey, rather than those they use in intracommunity fights. In all observed cases, the attack continues until the victim stops moving (Goodall, 1986). Chimpanzee males also fight each other for status within the community, but the behavior is different. Group killing of an individual within the community occurs, but it is unusual (Wrangham, 1999). Typically, intracommunity fights involve threats and blows rather than biting, twisting off limbs, and so forth. Fights usually end when the loser indicates submission by groveling or presenting sexually, and the winner accepts by a friendly touch or gesture. The combatants have an ability to reconcile that is surprising to human observers (de Waal & Lanting, 1997; Goodall, 1986; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). Blair concludes that chimpanzees must have

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a “violence inhibition mechanism” or “VIM” that is activated by gestures of submission. He suggests that normal human beings also have a VIM (Blair, 1995, p. 3). A chimpanzee who has been attacked by foreign invaders will attempt to placate the intruders by showing submission, but the attackers typically ignore these attempts at appeasement (de Waal & Lanting, 1997; Goodall, 1986; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). Apparently the violence inhibition mechanism does not engage in this circumstance. Chimpanzees form factions within the community. These are frequently changed. The course of chimpanzee politics—who is aligned with whom, who remains loyal, who has betrayed whom, or who has rebelled— is a matter of great interest to the chimpanzees themselves and to the human observers (de Waal, 1982; de Waal & Lanting, 1997; Goodall, 1986; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). Chimpanzees have politics in a sense quite similar to the human sense. As noted, in intracommunity fights, gestures of submission are often accepted peacefully, but they are rejected in intercommunity fights. Clearly, for chimpanzees, war (or raiding) is not the continuation of politics by other means. It has different causes and it involves different behaviors. It must depend upon different proximate, psychological rewards. In their book Demonic Males (1996), Wrangham and Peterson draw a parallel between chimpanzee raids and human behaviors, especially the raids and counter-raids of small, hostile human groups. We may ask whether the analogy works. Human wars are different from chimpanzee raids. Usually there are resources in dispute. Most pogroms also involve motives in addition to the violence itself. Pogroms against Jews in Europe and Armenians in Turkey involved rape and plunder as well as unprovoked slaughter (Morgenthau, 2000; Strom & Parsons, 1982). Rape and plunder were significant factors in the genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda (Des Forges, 1999). In many traditional societies, raiding would also involve the taking of slaves, especially women and children (Keeley, 1996). Women’s hostility to enemy groups may be related to the fear of rape (Navarrete, McDonald, Molina, & Sidanius, 2010). Certain crimes in the United States do seem to resemble the chimpanzee raids. In some cases, coalitions of young men travel together to find strangers to kill (Ranalli & Belkin, 2002; Manly & Nealon, 1992). For example, in 2009, four teenaged boys in New Hampshire picked an isolated house. On finding a sleeping mother and daughter, they slashed both with machetes until their screaming stopped (MacQuarrie, 2010). There have been reports of young men going out to find homeless people to beat and

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murder (Ellement & Levenson, 2007; Lewan, 2007). In these incidents the victims were not hated. The killings were done for fun. In other cases, groups of men pick out a member of another ethnic group to kill. There is no robbery (Levin & McDevitt, 1993). Such hate crimes are often marked by overkill, that is, by torture before death and continued attacks on the body after death (Allen, Als, Lewis, & Litwack, 2000). Women sometimes go along to watch, but rarely participate (Blee, 2002). In 1981, three members of the Ku Klux Klan went hunting for an African American to kill. There was an element of third-party revenge: Klan leaders had asked for a killing of an African American because there had been a hung jury in the case of an African American accused of killing a European American (Smith, 1997). The three Klansmen selected a passerby and forced him into a car at gunpoint. They asked his name, and he told them: Michael Donald. They drove him to a secluded place and then attacked him. At first he fought back with all his might, but finally he gave over and lay still. They hit him more than 100 times with a tree limb. They strangled him with a rope, slit his throat, and stomped on his face with their boots. Then they hung his body from a tree. He was 19 years old (Smith, 1997; Toronto Star, February 5, 1988). The prolongation of the killing suggests that the killers enjoy what they are doing. Participants in some hate crimes have told investigators directly that they enjoy the violence (Blee, 2002; Levin & McDevitt, 1993). The men who killed Michael Donald had previously beaten a gay man at the same spot (Smith, 1997). Like the prolongation, the repetition suggests that the young men found the activity enjoyable in itself. The two motivations of hatred and enjoyment of violence may add to each other; certainly, they are not mutually exclusive. The chimpanzee and human killings are similar in form: A group of young males go out together, find an individual they do not know, and kill him or her. We do not know if they are homologous, that is, derived from the same ancestral trait. If they are homologous, then violent conflict between groups would have been the norm from the time of our common ancestors with the chimpanzees, five to seven million years ago, until the present day, as Wrangham and Peterson (1996) have argued. It would mean that conflict is humankind’s baseline condition. In fact, the historical record, the ethnographic record of nonliterate peoples, and the archeological record all indicate that raiding has been all but universal (Keeley, 1996). It may be the case that human raiding behaviors are an evolutionary holdover. Where the relevant communities are not small, male kinship groups, antiforeign violence may no longer confer a significant evolutionary advantage in and of itself. Since small patrilineal clans persisted well

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into historical times, it may be that there simply has not been enough time for the behavior to be selected out in response to the change. Or, it may be that raids produce some other benefits often enough so that the trait is not disadvantageous to the individual even now. Such benefits might include incidental opportunities for rape and robbery that the sought-after violence produces (see McDonald et al., 2012). There is an obvious and significant difference between chimpanzee raids and third-party revenge. There is no known provocation for the chimpanzee raids, while third-party revenge is precisely a response to provocation. It is worthwhile to distinguish two points in this connection: (1) Human males may still retain a chimpanzee-like disposition towards unprovoked raiding; and (2) Third-party revenge could result from a refinement or redirection of the raiding genes. Evolution does not have the option of starting fresh and most often achieves its results by reworking existing traits. It may have done that here. We will return below to the questions of how and why evolution might have redirected the raiding genes. There is nothing in evolution that makes group-on-group violence inevitable, even for species that live in groups. Such violence is actually rare among vertebrates. The bonobo (pan paniscus) is more closely related to the chimpanzee (pan troglodytes) than the human is. The hominid line diverged from the chimpanzee line about five million years ago, while the bonobo line diverged just three million years ago (de Waal & Lanting, 1997). Bonobos live in communities, much as chimpanzees do. Neither sex goes to raid foreign communities, so far as we know (Wilson & Wrangham, 2003). This may be because bonobo females do not forage alone, unlike chimpanzee females, and therefore do not present an easy target (males do not forage alone in either species) (de Waal & Lanting, 1997). Perhaps human evolution would have taken a different path if human ancestors had resembled present-day bonobos. But once evolution starts down a given path, the steps it takes constrain the steps it can take later. Once a behavior has evolved, the individual must adapt to the presence of that behavior in its conspecifics, whether or not the original reason for the behavior still exists. Once group-on-group conflict evolved and became widespread, individual human beings faced selection pressure to adapt to it. If conflict was the norm in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, individuals would have been selected for their ability to flourish during conflicts. Starting or ending enmity between groups would be important, but unusual. Most of the time the primary task for the individual would be to find his place in an ongoing conflict. He would need to know his ingroup and his outgroup, and he would need to have appropriate feelings for each. If the enemy is going to treat him as part of a group regardless of what he does, then he will bear the cost of group-on-group conflict no matter what

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he does. If he is to bear the cost anyway, then he might as well reap the benefits of group defense, and offense. Among chimpanzees, just being unfamiliar is enough to draw hostility. Kohler found that a stranger female he attempted to introduce to his captive group at Tenerife was attacked viciously (Goodall, 1986). Other primatologists were forced to abandon an attempt to release captive chimpanzees into the wild in Senegal, because the rehabilitants were attacked and almost killed by native chimpanzees (Goodall, 1986; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). In the wild, young females usually change communities while they are in estrus. This earns them a reprieve from the males. The resident females are unfriendly, but they do not inflict serious injury. Humans have a natural mistrust of the foreign and strange, but unfamiliarity by itself is not enough to label an individual an enemy alien. People didn’t anticipate the strength of the reaction of the chimpanzees to a stranger, as they should have done if they had similar feelings. Evidently this is a point in which humans and chimpanzees differ. The chimpanzee knows every individual member of his group, which usually numbers fewer than 60 (Nishida & Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, 1987; Goodall, 1986). The human doesn’t know every member of his group, which can number in the hundreds of millions. Lacking familiar/unfamiliar as the rule, humans must employ other means of distinguishing ingroup from outgroup. Familiarity is a necessary condition for a chimpanzee to be identified as “one of us” by other chimpanzees, but it is not sufficient. Chimpanzee communities can split into factions that travel about separately. In such a case, one faction can attack the other, killing known and familiar individuals (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). In this humans are similar to chimpanzees. During the genocide in Rwanda, teachers killed their students, doctors their patients (Gourevitch, 1998), and pastors their parishioners (Lacey, 2001). In Bosnia, friends killed friends (Hewstone & Cairns, 2001). Familiarity is not a sufficient condition for belonging in humans, either. Human groups can form alliances with foreign groups. Chimpanzees never do. While it is true that among humans, the allied “others” may not be fully trusted, they are not necessarily hated either. For male chimpanzees, a foreign group, like a foreign individual, is always the enemy. For humans, a group can be “other” without being “enemy.” This suggests that “one did it/they all did it” might serve to indicate when an “other” group is “enemy.” In humans, the identity of the outgroup is learned. It is possible that “the ones who attack us” is a defining characteristic of “enemy group” in the human mind, at the level of emotion. That is, an attack by a member of a recognizable group may cause people to consider that entire group “enemy,” even if they did not before. Or, if the group was already felt to be

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“enemy,” the attack may intensify the feeling (see Bar-Tal & Labin, 2001, for an example). The definitional limits, “who is in the other group,” must be handled separately—maybe by explicit cultural belief, maybe by behavior, maybe by place of residence, or maybe just by association. Dentan (1992) suggests that attacks from other groups can also affect how one defines one’s ingroup; peoples who are threatened en masse may begin to see themselves as a unit even if they did not do so previously. For the most part, the problem of how groups are defined is outside the scope of this essay. However, it is worth noting that humans seem to have a remarkably free hand in making up the definition of groups. Once a group is defined it may come to be seen as a possible faction that could act in unity against other factions (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999; Tajfel, 1981; Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2001). Humans readily favor the group that includes the self, even when they are aware that an assignment to groups has been made randomly (Tajfel, 1981). Nations are not the only communities that may be imagined (Anderson, 1983; Chirot, 1997). Not all outgroups (groups to which one does not belong oneself) are enemies, but once an outgroup is recognized, it can potentially be placed into the emotional category “enemy.” This general approach is not new. Barkow, among others, has suggested that we inherit a predisposition for learning the hatred of other peoples with ease (Barkow, 1989; McDonald et al., 2012). The hypothesis of particular triggers for feelings of enmity is simply a more specific form of a general hypothesis that has formed a part of the ethnocentrism literature for some time. The underlying idea is that there is a constellation of emotions for the “enemy.” These include hate and fear, as well as a kind of coldness or shutting down of the empathy that might otherwise be available (Bar-Tal, 1989). Subjectively, the enemy is experienced as the source and cause of the hatred and fear (Allport, 1954; Blee, 2002). Most people do not introspect enough to consider that the first cause of the hatred might ever lie in themselves; it is specifically located in the others in their imagination (BarTal, 1989). As the inhibition of empathy is preconscious, it would not ordinarily be the subject of reflection either. The feeling for the category “enemy” is inherited, and the set of emotions that accompany it is inherited, while the specific content of the category is learned. An attack may be enough to bring up the entire set of emotions, hate, fear, and coldness, or at least to lower the threshold for them such that a cause for hate that would not be sufficient before the attack would become sufficient afterwards. The emotional category could have come down to us, with changes, from some antecedent feeling for outsiders held by our common ancestor with the chimpanzees. “The ones who attack us” is not usually enough to settle who is in the

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other group and who is not. But if the other group is already defined as a group of some sort, with some kind of boundary, then it may get the emotional label “enemy,” and the emotions of enmity may extend out all the way to the cultural boundary of the group, with or without cultural permission. The suppression of empathy towards the outgroup may share an ancestral origin with chimpanzees’ refusal to relent in the face of submission gestures from an enemy. In Blair’s terms, the “violence inhibition mechanism” would be suppressed (Blair, 1995). We may distinguish between the defensive and the offensive aspects of “one did it/they all did it.” The function of the defensive reaction, fear, is clear. If another group is likely to be seeking to harm your entire group including you, then it is to your advantage to fear them all at the first sign of hostility, without waiting for experience with each individual. It may even be to your advantage to anticipate the same type of harm that was inflicted before, if whole groups do have customary methods of attacking. The evolutionary advantage of the offensive reaction, the revenge attack, is less clear. There are two benefits: the physical destruction of competitors and the intimidation of the surviving outgroup members. These benefits are spread over the avengers’ entire ingroup, while the risk is concentrated on the avengers themselves. How can the trait persist? Why aren’t the individuals who don’t go on revenge raids favored over the ones who do? There is also a potential cost to the ingroup in that the outgroup may be provoked to attack back, beyond whatever its baseline level of attacking had been. It may seem contradictory to claim that the revenge attack both intimidates the other group and provokes it to attack again. However, the theory specifies only that the placement of a particular outgroup into the category “enemy” produces hate, fear, and coldness. It does not specify the ratio among them. Fear may be adjusted according to the perceived strength of the enemy. People who want to strike back may decide not to, either because of conscious deliberate thought or because of fear. In the case of the unprovoked chimpanzee raids, the risk is small and males do not go unless other males go with them, thus both diminishing and spreading the risk. The preferred targets for raids are babies and isolated females (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). Perhaps in human third-party revenge helpless third parties are also preferred targets, and group attacks the preferred mode (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996; Des Forges, 1999). The group that is assisted by a chimpanzee raid is a small group of the males’ close kin. The attacker’s genes are benefited not only in his self, but also in his kin. In the environment of evolutionary adaptation, humans probably also lived in small kin groups, so this factor may have been strong at the time revenge raiding may have evolved. Still, the behavior has per-

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sisted into the present, when the relevant group is often not a small kin group. It may be possible to explain the persistence of genes for the behavior by appealing to cultural selection. To this day, many cultures reward people, or just men, who take revenge, and punish those who refuse to do so. This would be true, for example, in the Southern U.S. culture (Nisbett & Cohen, 1966), in the revenge culture of Albania (Blumenfeld, 2002) and Montenegro (Djilas, 1958), in traditional Melanesian cultures (Trompf, 1994), and among the Yanomamo of Brazil (Chagnon, 1992). These rewards and punishments could make it more profitable for an individual to take part in a revenge raid than not to, even where the profit is measured in terms of the number of children a man is likely to have. Cultures that were known to strike back may have survived better than cultures that were known not to. Selection among cultures may have acted on the evolution of genes. To be clear, this is only an argument that revenge raiding may still be adaptive, not that unprovoked raiding is. The idea is that a liking for raiding might have been conserved because it is functional when it is combined with the desire for group revenge. Sexual lust and love can occur together or separately. Perhaps bloodlust and hatred can also occur together or separately, and the separate trait of bloodlust may be conserved in part because the combination was adaptive. The eagerness to strike back against a group that has harmed the ingroup is suggestive of the conflict between factions within a group. Chimpanzees strike out against any alien group. It is not a question of revenge. But, like humans, chimpanzees engage in extensive reciprocity within their own communities. They tend to pay back help with help and harm with harm. It is like revenge. Behaviors that our ancestors employed towards intracommunity factions might gradually have come to be applied across communities. If there was such a transformation, that would explain why humans can ally with foreign groups; they have come to be treated like factions, which can become allies even after they have been enemies. One could ask how the transition could ever have been made, if our common ancestor was like the chimpanzees of today. For a chimpanzee, any lone outsider is subject to attack. How could a species have made the jump from that position, to a position of accepting outsiders as allies? It would be a surprising development, but not an inexplicable one. Chimpanzees already show that they do not keep intra-community fighting and intercommunity fighting perfectly distinct. If a subgroup of males withdraws and moves out, it is subject to being treated as “enemy” later on. Perhaps ancestral hominids could treat a former faction as “enemy,” yet later accept it back in as an ally in factional strife. If domestic factions pass the border of the group in both directions, if a “new” enemy can become an ally, then

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it may not be so great a step to let in “old” enemies as allies, particularly if language permits explicit bargains to be struck. There is an implication in this for peacemaking: However intense the status of “enemy” while it lasts, the status itself is not immutable. In theory, a given group that was once an enemy could become an ally, as many do in fact. If factional fighting played a role in the evolution of third-party revenge, that would help to explain why women feel the emotions of thirdparty revenge. Both female chimpanzees and female humans engage in factional fighting (Goodall, 1986; Pusey, Williams, & Goodall, 1997). With this analysis in hand, we are in a better position to explain thirdparty revenge. The explanation requires two steps. The first is that the initial offense by members of another group causes ingroup members to see the entire alien group as “enemy.” Respect and empathy are inhibited or withdrawn towards individual enemies. The second step is that the emotions of reciprocity are engaged: hurt and fury and vindictiveness. These are emotions that had their evolutionary origin in encounters between individuals and small factions (de Waal, 1982). Oddly, the attack on innocent and helpless members of another group is accompanied by an emotion of moral self-righteousness (Lickel et al., 2006). The oddness consists in the conflict with ordinary moral codes that are applied within the group. Some cultures have noticed the oddness and proscribed third-party revenge, or directed that it cannot be used against children, or against women, or against unarmed persons caught unaware. Nevertheless, the impulse towards it, righteousness and all, can often be detected in people from these cultures (de Zayas, 1986; Ignatieff, 1997). Thus, third-party revenge raids could have evolved from the combination in humans of two behavior patterns that are separate in chimpanzees and may have been separate in our common ancestors, as seen in deadly unprovoked raids on foreign communities, where revenge is not an apparent motive, and fighting between factions in the home community, where it is (see McDonald et al., 2012). The intrusion of factional feeling into enemy relations would account for the subjective moral indignation that accompanies these attacks on the innocent. If we intuitively feel as if all of another group is “enemy” when any of them attack us, it seems logical to ask whether we also feel as if all of another group is “enemy” if any of us attack them. III.

THE ONES WE ATTACK ARE ENEMIES

A second defining characteristic of enemy in the human mind might be “the people we attack.” That is, seeing members of one’s own group attacking members of another might lead one to identify the other group as

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“enemy.” Of course, if the other group also feels that if “one did it/they all did it,” then they will be made into enemies by the attack itself even if they were not enemies beforehand. In that case, it is quite accurate to see “the people we attack” as enemies. Note that the reason for the attack is irrelevant. All that is necessary to invoke the response is the violent attack itself. It might have been ordered by leaders to secure some advantage in power or resources, without the leaders’ experiencing any particular animus towards the victims at first, but if the hypothesis is correct, then the leaders and the fighters would begin to hate after the fact. The Semai-Senoi people of Malaysia are one of the most peaceful cultures known. They deal with conflict with other peoples by retreating. They have extremely low levels of individual violence within the culture. Nevertheless, in the 1950s the British recruited some Semai men into the army. The anthropologist Robert Knox Dentan wrote about the result: Many people who knew the Semai insisted that such an unwarlike people could never make good soldiers. Interestingly enough, they were wrong. Communist terrorists had killed the kinsmen of some of the Semai counterinsurgency troops. Taken out of their nonviolent society and ordered to kill, they seem to have been swept up in a sort of insanity which they call “blood drunkenness.” A typical veteran’s story runs like this, “We killed, killed, killed. The Malays would stop and go through people’s pockets and take their watches and money. We did not think of watches or money. We thought only of killing. Wah, truly we were drunk with blood.” One man even told how he had drunk the blood of a man he had killed. (1968, pp. 58-59)

It is not clear whether the men had begun to hate the communists, or whether they were simply swept up in the violence. Since communists had killed their kinsmen, there could have been an element of third-party revenge. In addition, if it is true that “the people we attack” are experienced emotionally as enemies, then the fighting itself would have tended to make them hate. This example is ambiguous since it is not clear whether the Semai-Senoi began to hate the communists or whether they came to like the violence; certainly they reached the point of coldness towards those they killed. The hypothesis implies that an attack by a few ought to stir the emotion of hatred in the many. Osama bin Laden’s 2001 attack on the United States should have increased hatred of the United States among people who considered bin Laden a member of their ingroup. The effect might not show in averaged results from questionnaires since it might have been counteracted by increases in sympathy for Americans on the part of some, but it should be detectable. There should be at least a segment of the popu-

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lation(s) among whom hatred of Americans began or intensified. That is, either the average should show increased hostility, or the population should diverge, with some moving towards sympathy from their prior position, and some towards antipathy. Of course, for a test of the hypothesis it would be necessary to have given questionnaires immediately after 9/11/01, before the United States’ attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq could provoke a Roque effect. The attacks against German Jews on Kristallnacht may have inflamed German antisemitism by their very occurrence. For this reason the effect may be called the “Kristallnacht effect.” The reaction can be summarized as “we did it/they deserved it/hit them again.” Similarly, in the communist revolution in China, the peasants’ attacks on landlords may have increased hatred of the landlord class (Hinton, 1967). This analysis would suggest a double danger in hate crimes. Hate crimes might create new hate in the criminal’s group as well as in the victim’s. The injustice is complete: We are to hate people because we have attacked them. As far as evolution is concerned, the injustice is beside the point. Evolution is concerned with survival, not justice. To act as if the group that has been attacked is “the enemy” would contribute to individual and group survival. This approach can explain the otherwise surprising fact that members of powerful majorities sometimes feel fear of the very minorities that they have been victimizing. It is not just that they have a realistic fear of reprisals. They have unrealistic fears too. Blee found members of antisemitic hate groups who had little or no contact with actual Jews, but who believed nevertheless that powerful Jews were doing them harm by damaging their health, undermining their marriages, and preventing them from getting jobs. They seemed sincere (Blee, 2002). It is not possible to imagine that these antisemites derived these fears from evidence, and then derived their hatreds from the fears. It is more likely that they felt hatred and fear and produced these “reasons” for them after the fact. Hatred serves to motivate attacks, and possibly to motivate a more ferocious defense. Since it is safer to attack weak groups, there may be more hatred against weak groups than against strong ones. Numerically weak groups with economic resources have historically been subjected to violence by stronger groups (Chua, 2003; van den Berghe, 1981). Even a weak group without resources offers an opportunity for control of labor and sex, so weakness rather than wealth may be the critical point (Human Rights Watch, 1999; Varshney, 2002). The fear is there for two reasons: First, outgroups are in fact often powerful and hostile; second, even a weak outgroup that is not yet hostile may fight back if it is attacked. Once it is

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attacked, it will act like an enemy. Fear should accompany the wish to attack, so that the attackers can be prepared for retaliation. This anticipation of payback may be an effect of our having evolved to expect reciprocity between factions in a society. The evolutionary incentives in dealing with another faction are either to treat it well, so that the reciprocity will be beneficial, or else to damage it so badly that it does not have the strength to repay in kind. This may perhaps account for the extraordinary viciousness with which lower-caste people are punished when they step out of line, as well as for the energy that upper castes put into drawing the lines so as to confine the lower castes as tightly as possible (Dray, 2002; Human Rights Watch, 1999; Totten & Wagatsuma, 1966). The idea is that the algorithms for hatred normally operate below the level of consciousness, just as the neural mechanisms for constructing a mental image of space do. It is not a question of repressing knowledge of the triggers for hatred out of guilt. Since the mechanism operates outside of consciousness anyway, there is no knowledge to repress. The conscious explanations for the fear are extra. The mind assembles acceptable conscious reasons to explain why a hated group should be hated, regardless of the causative, unconscious reasons (see Gazzaniga, 1992). A cleverer hater might come up with more convincing conscious reasons for the fear than Blee’s informants did, but the reasons would still be secondary to the emotion. Of course, when there is actual retaliation, then the retaliation can be given as the reason for the fear, correctly enough. In short, the mechanisms for producing hatred in the individual mind may be exquisitely sensitive to the presence or threat of violent conflict. That would explain the observation that “essentialist” concepts of the enemy surface at times of violence, making negotiation and reconciliation ever more difficult (Rothchild, 1997). The “essentialist” concept of evil in an enemy group is the idea that the enemy is hostile in its very essence and thus not susceptible to ordinary incentives for peace or compromise. Cognitive dissonance could be appealed to as a supplementary or alternative explanation of “we did it/they deserved it/hit them again.” If one of our (good) group attacks one of the outgroup, then we feel the victim must have deserved it. A good person wouldn’t attack an innocent. It isn’t clear that the entire outgroup should be hated and feared from cognitive dissonance alone, however. They might or might not be. The cognitive dissonance could be resolved by any of a number of thought patterns, including blaming only the individual victim or victims. In contrast, the adaptationist theory predicts group-wide hate and fear specifically. Nazi Germans would be expected to hate and fear Jews more after Kristallnacht than before, and European Americans to hate and fear African Americans more after a lynching than before, because hate and fear are appropriate to the category

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“enemy.” The difference in prediction in the two theories is that the adaptationist theory predicts regularity in the emotional response to an attack across times and places, while cognitive dissonance theory predicts variability. In practice, the test will be difficult to make because both theories allow for some variability. Both theories admit that reality occasionally intrudes into thought and feeling. In reality, Jews were less powerful after Kristallnacht than before, and African Americans probably less powerful after a lynching than before, and therefore less to be feared. Both theories admit that human reactions can be modified by culture. The adaptationist theory predicts a stronger regularity than the dissonance theory does, but it doesn’t predict perfect regularity. IV.

THE ONES WE HATE ARE ENEMIES

It may not be necessary to participate in or even to observe an actual attack on the enemy to induce new hate. The enemy may be “the people that we hate” or “the people that we want to attack.” Fears can be learned by observing fear in others. Perhaps hatred can be learned in the same way. Researchers have demonstrated that monkeys can learn fears from other monkeys. Most laboratory-reared rhesus monkeys are not afraid of snakes, although wild-caught rhesus are terrified of them. Cook and Mineka (1989) found that eight minutes of viewing a videotape of a rhesus monkey screaming in the presence of a snake would leave a previously naive laboratory monkey with a permanent fear of snakes. In another experiment (Ohman & Mineka, 2001), the researchers edited out the image of the real snake from the videotape and edited in a toy snake, a toy crocodile, a toy rabbit, or artificial flowers. The monkeys in the audience learned fear of the toy snake and crocodile, but not of the rabbit or the flowers. It seems that what the rhesus inherit is not a fear of snakes as such, but an algorithm for learning the fear of snake-like things (perhaps long and scaly things) from other rhesus. Barkow (1989) has suggested that we inherit a special capacity for learning the hatred of other groups. Perhaps humans have an inherited tendency to acquire an attitude of hatred by imitating others’ hatreds. Obviously we do imitate others’ hatreds, especially in the case of children imitating parents (Allport, 1954; Blee, 2002). Both innate and acquired fears depend on activity in the amygdala nucleus of the temporal lobe of the brain (Phelps & LeDoux, 2005). Activity in the amygdala during viewing of an outgroup face correlates with implicit measures of fear or tension towards an outgroup (Phelps et al., 2000). Pathological fears, or phobias, develop towards threats that existed in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, such as snakes and spiders, but

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not to threats that came into existence more recently, like guns and knives. Consequently phobias are thought to stem from evolved fears (Seligman, 1971; Seligman & Hager, 1972). Our inherited tendency to hate groups may also be overexpressed in some cases (Poussaint, 2002; Dunbar, 2004; Sullaway, 2004). An uncontrollable hatred could be called a misia, from the Greek word for hatred, misos. The uncontrollable hatred of a group could be called genomisia. As with fear, the level of hatred could be either normal or pathological. People who suffer from pathological hatreds could be termed misics. The study of misias may help us to understand normal hatreds, much as the study of phobias has helped us to understand normal fears. Presumably there were originally simple markers that indicated who the other group were. If our ancestors were like the chimpanzees, then the first marker would have been unfamiliarity. Later it might have been something else, possibly physical strangeness or difference. Visual markers could have become less and less important and cultural learning about “who is the enemy” more and more important. Even if there is, or was, an inherited tendency to learn the appearance of one’s own group, it would not necessarily apply only to faces or bodies. A general tendency to look for familiar appearance would also apply to clothing, body markings, and the like (C. Surowiec, personal communication, 2001). This could be one means by which a cultural group could be substituted for a biological one. Language would be another (Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2001), and cultural moral systems yet another (van der Dennen, 1999). “The ones my people hate” may also be a defining characteristic of “enemy”; this may also apply as people choose up sides to form factions. In humans, the concept of the “loyal opposition” may be obtainable only with a diligent cultural effort. If our evolution has prepared us to learn group hatreds with ease, then the “free marketplace of ideas,” as Americans like to call it, is not a fair market. Prejudice may have its thumb on the scales in that market, and prejudice may be backed by adaptations for enmity. The intensity of group hatred is sometimes attributed to the effects of centuries of conflict, but this view is suspect. No person has more than a single lifetime in which to learn to hate. The question is how the lesson takes place. If we have a special propensity for learning hatreds from others, then hatred could spread quickly through a population. This idea could help to explain the paradox of German history. At the time of the First World War, Germany was not more antisemitic than Russia or France (Bauer, 2001), yet it was Germany that created the Holocaust of 1941-1945. An antisemitic minority party came to power in 1933 and used the weapons of totalitarian propaganda and political control to teach an extreme, nonsen-

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sical antisemitism (Bauer, 2001; Dawidowicz, 1975). Hitler may have been such an effective purveyor of hatred not because of his eloquence, which was average, but because of the vividness of his emotional displays, which was unsurpassed. His teaching could take hold in less than a generation partly because a more moderate cultural antisemitism had prepared people for the message, partly because the removal of Jews from social contact with Gentiles removed the most obvious reality check, and partly—on this hypothesis—because hatred is an easy lesson. If people feel as if hatred makes sense, they may fail to notice when it doesn’t. V.

DO WE NEED

TO

FIND

AN

ENEMY?

If we do have a prepared emotional category for “the enemy,” then the very existence of that category may predispose us towards conflict. Adapted emotions permit us to anticipate. The hungry child looks anxiously to see whether her brother has more food than she does, though her mother has given them both the same amount. The jealous husband is suspicious of his wife’s sexual opportunities, though she doesn’t have any. Perhaps we also look to find enemies. If we have an innate tendency to identify an enemy group, we might also have a psychological need to identify one. As George W. Bush put it in the year 2000: When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and we knew exactly who the “they” were. It was us versus them. And it was clear who “them” was. Today, we’re not so sure who the “they” are. But we know they’re there. (Kornblut, 2000)

Van der Dennen (1999) remarks on the seeming affinity that people have for the idea of an enemy. He raises the possibility that people enjoy their “red-blooded” hatreds. Another possibility is that people already have a sense of apprehension towards others, and feel more oriented when they know who their enemy is. People seem slower to take on new enemies when they already have old ones. Varshney found that when Shias and Sunnis in India hated each other, they were slow to anger against Hindus; and where lower-caste Hindus hated upper-caste Hindus they were slow to anger against Muslims (Varshney, 2002). Perhaps the psychological need for an enemy had already been satisfied. It is generally true across species, that if the appropriate object for a given evolved behavior is not available when an animal is primed for it, the animal will treat the next-closest object as if it were the real thing (Tinbergen, 1969; Lorenz, 1970). A pregnant mouse that is ready to build a

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nest will carry soft wood shavings to one corner of her cage. If nothing soft is available, she will carry whatever is there and deposit it, and if nothing at all is available, she will carry her tail to the corner of the cage, and drop it, and do it again. A cat that has no mouse to chase will pounce on a piece of string. It isn’t going to eat the string, it just needs to hunt. The English kept up a vigorous literary tradition of antisemitism for 400 years after the Jews were expelled from England (Goldhagen, 1996). A story that is repeated for 400 years has to be a “good story” in the sense of being emotionally satisfying. Apparently it is satisfying to have an enemy to hate. If we need to locate an enemy, then there is a danger that people lacking obvious enemies will begin to treat any group other than their own as if it were the enemy. When no one else is available to be the enemy, coresident groups might be cast in the role no matter what they do. The tragedy of the Jews and the Roma in Europe may be explained in some part by this dynamic. VI.

CONCLUSION

From prehistory onwards, most humans have been born into a setting of violent conflict between groups. Consequently, humans may be expected to be adapted to group conflict. One of the adaptations may be anticipation of an enemy group. The mind may be prepared to treat enemies with hate, fear, and the preconscious inhibition of empathy, or coldness. Chimpanzees likewise have raiding against other groups. For male chimpanzees, all groups except the natal group are enemies. Unlike the male chimpanzees, humans must learn which outgroups are enemies. It is proposed that we utilize three simple algorithms for this learning: (1) If any members of an outgroup attack us, then that outgroup is enemy. All the members of that group are suspected of being inclined to repeat the same pernicious behavior. At the level of emotion, they are considered already to have done it. Since the boundaries of the group are defined socially, they vary by culture. Whatever the boundaries are, hate, fear, coldness, and the specific accusation extend out to them, encompassing everyone within. This explains the desire for third-party revenge. (2) If any member of the ingroup attacks any member of an outgroup, then that outgroup is enemy. If the first algorithm is correct, then the second one must be adaptive. We would hate those we attack without being aware that the attack itself is a cause of the hatred. (3) If other members of our ingroup hate an outgroup, then that outgroup is enemy. These hypotheses describe only the psychology of individuals, but they can account for considerable unity of action in groups. The proposed algorithms would allow the individual to identify

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likely sources of attack against himself and his group. At the level of the individual, they facilitate the anticipation of danger. At the level of groups, they sustain the cycle of violence. If human feelings of enmity are innate and spontaneous, they are not infinitely strong. It is possible to overcome them, but people need a reason to do it. Conscience may provide a reason; but it must be admitted that there are moral systems that require hatred as well as moral systems that condemn it (Djilas, 1958; Lifton, 1986). Compassion may provide a reason, especially in cases of personal acquaintance (Des Forges, 1999). Occasionally the conflict between feeling and reality that the evolved mechanisms set up provokes people into noticing the absurdity of human feelings towards other groups (Lee, 1983; Levi, 1986; Oz, 2000; Twain, 1981). The psychological mechanisms behind hatred are not usually evaluated at all, because people have no conscious awareness of them. One may hope that an understanding of these mechanisms will foster compassion and reason, or, at the least, an appreciation for the absurd in human behavior, in opposition to the serious and unquestioning hatreds that are so common in human affairs. ACKNOWLEDGMENT I thank Christina Surowiec for helpful commentary. AUTHOR’S NOTE Communications can be addressed to the author at: Willa Michener Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, E40-400, 1 Amherst Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 Email: [email protected] REFERENCES Abuelaish, I. (2010). I shall not hate: A Gaza doctor’s journey on the road to peace and human dignity. New York, NY: Walter. Allen, J., Als, H., Lewis, J., & Litwack, L. F. (2000). Without sanctuary: Lynching photography in America. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms. Alexander, R. (1987). The biology of moral systems. New York, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Allport, G. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Anderson, B. R. O’G. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London, UK: Verso.

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